Environmental Stewardship

One of Country Day’s stated goals is to teach our students sustainability in its many incarnations, from the intensely local to the extensively global. Middle School science teacher and Green School Coordinator Barbara Bromley is the person most directly responsible for helping LCDS realize that goal.

“When Head of School Steve Lisk signed the Green School Alliance Pledge in 2011, he endorsed the school's mission to promote the principles and actions of environmental stewardship,” Bromley said. As green school coordinator, she has helped design and build six learning gardens at the school, and works to ensure that the use of outdoor space and environmental awareness is woven into the curriculum across grades and disciplines.

“An outdoor classroom experience is about the need to create a balance between the virtual world with which our children increasingly interact and the natural world in which they live,” Bromley said. By simply taking lessons outside and looking around with a critical eye, students learn to see and interpret the world around them in a whole new way.

But eco-learning extends beyond the school gardens and outdoor learning spaces. Green intiatives include annual Earth Day speakers, all-school recycling and energy conservation, the Upper School Green Committee and an EcoLiteracy series sponsored by the Parents Association that teaches Lower School children about the variety of fruits and vegetables and how to cook with them.

“We’re all in this together,” Bromley said. “Almost all of the components of our green initiatives involve the entire school community. Older kids helping out younger kids, parents helping out students, teachers helping out parents: It all builds ties, both within the school and without.”

An independent, college-preparatory school founded in 1908, Lancaster Country Day School combines a rigorous curriculum with a supportive and encouraging faculty to ensure that every preschool-12th grade student receives the best education available. In addition to Lancaster, students come from Hershey, York and Reading to become part of our vibrant, high-spirited community.